2005 - A Good Season

The 2005 season was incredible, the soil in good heart from its long rest, the weather perfect (if a little dry at times for seedling establishment) and everything I put in the ground seemed just to grow and grow (and then the rabbits would eat it all!)  We NEEDED a fence!  But in spite of a sustained rabbit attack we still seemed to have harvestable crops, enough to supply 15 or so weekly veg boxes and had 3 restaurants taking regular orders and then somewhere in all of this mad, abundance Katie was born. It was August and blisteringly hot, I dug the potatoes for the boxes on Friday morning, had Katie at home in the wee small hours of Saturday and was digging potatoes again on Tuesday. I swear that the weeding, digging and bending that I had done for the previous 9 months. real 3rd world peasant farming stuff, was a massive contributor to a speedy and uncomplicated birth and bouncing back to normality so quickly Its not, after all, an illness, despite the best efforts of modern medicine to turn it into one!

By September the garden seemed to have been there forever. Untidy, with no planned rotation and with Katie sleeping in the shade of the runner beans in the huge old pram it all seemed like an exhausting blur! But I look back at that first summer and laugh at my ambition and don't quite believe what I managed to achieve on my own with a 2 year old at my feet and pregnant. OK there were far too many weeds and we had no watering facility at all but it was beautiful and I could already see that William was gong to get the chance to grow up within the rhythm of the year, understanding without ever having to learn, about nurturing, about seasonality, about our responsibility to the planet and to our little piece of it. I saw our first grass snake that late summer and slowly we began to be aware of weasels, toads and kestrels all using the garden for hunting. It was a good start.